Anti-AIPerson

Daniel Dennett

Philosopher of Mind

One of the most influential philosophers of mind of the past half-century, Dennett spent his final year warning that AI “counterfeit people” are the most dangerous artifacts in human history — and demanding laws to outlaw them.

Academic

Wikipedia The Problem With Counterfeit People

In his words

These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself.

— The Atlantic, 2023

If we don’t create, endorse and establish some new rules and laws about how to think about this, we’re going to lose the capacity for human trust and that could be the end of civilisation.

— The Spectator, 2024

Biography

Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) was a professor emeritus at Tufts University and one of the defining philosophers of mind of his era — the author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and a lifelong champion of the view that minds are, at bottom, machines. That made his final campaign all the more striking: the man who spent decades arguing that computation could explain consciousness ended his life warning that AI’s ability to impersonate humans could unravel civilization.

Counterfeit people

In May 2023 Dennett published “The Problem With Counterfeit People” in The Atlantic, arguing that AI systems that pass for real humans should be outlawed the way counterfeit money is — with severe penalties for both those who create them and those who pass them along. “Creating counterfeit digital people risks destroying our civilization,” he wrote. That same month he signed the Center for AI Safety’s Statement on AI Risk, which declared mitigating the risk of extinction from AI a global priority.

Notably, Dennett had little patience for the classic robot-takeover scenario. In his last interview, published by The Spectator after his death in April 2024, he waved away fears of a conscious AGI enslaving humanity — “Yawn!” — insisting the real emergency was deception: deepfakes and chatbots eroding the trust and testimony on which democratic society depends. As he told Tufts Now in 2023, “The most pressing problem is not that they’re going to take our jobs… but that they’re going to destroy human trust.”